by T. C. Boyle
She bent over him, said, ‘Aren’t you cold there, Sam?’
He didn’t answer. Just spread one palm out on the clear, cold ICE and contemplated it. Then he looked up at her, curious, puzzled, needing a word, an explanation, a key to the mystery: WHAT ICE? he asked.
She laughed. ‘Did you see that, Guy?’ Guy was standing over him now too. They were both grinning. She said, ‘You know what it is. It’s water’ – and she signed it, WATER – ‘that gets frozen, like at home? In the freezer? With the ICE CUBES?’
He knew that, but it wasn’t what he was asking. What he was asking was how, was why, was what it meant. He tried again, talking through his fingers that were already stiffening with the cold. WHAT ICE? he repeated. And then, because that was circular, that wasn’t what he meant, he tried, WHY ICE? And then, because that wasn’t it either, he asked, HOW ICE?
ALPHA, BETA
The flight was a nightmare, beginning to end. He’d booked at the last minute and wound up with a seat all the way in back, wedged up against the window beside a 260-pound kid who played nose tackle for the UCSM team and wanted to know his opinion not only of all the teams in the conference but the pros as well – and what had he thought of the Super Bowl? The Raiders rock, don’t they? Then there was Denver. He sat at the bar in the airport for three hours while the overhead monitors went schizophrenic – the flight now on, now off, now delayed fifty minutes, now an hour and a half – and all the while he was struggling to keep the images of Johnny Carson, Moncrief, Sam and her – her, most of all – clear in his head. What would he say to Johnny? What would he say to Moncrief (and what would Moncrief say to him when he broke the news to him)? And Aimee. He missed her more than he wanted to admit because she was the one who’d walked out on him, and he didn’t like that power dynamic at all – no, not one bit. And yet, by the time he did get to her, by the time she appeared there at the gate with her hopeful face and yielding eyes and her hair and lips and sweet tight jeans, he was beyond drunk and so burned out he could barely function. They hugged fleetingly, kissed like strangers. And then it was her cramped, depressing apartment and the single bed pushed up against the wall.
He made up for it in the morning. The bed was barely wider than his shoulders, but they managed, the whole world gone silent and a sun pale as sliced lemon, creeping in under the shades, and she needed the affirmation – the sex – as much as he did. Here she was, Aimee, sweet-faced, sweet-tempered, the ultra-capable girl who’d so thoroughly filled the vacuum left by Melanie he’d gone whole days without hearing his ex-wife’s voice rattling around in the margins of his head. Aimee. He wanted her back. But she wasn’t going anywhere without Sam and if the alternative was for him to come here – to her – he’d need the department to grant him a leave and the NIH or NSF or whoever to pony up and fund a new project – and Moncrief to sign on. Without Moncrief, there was nothing, no Aimee, no money, no career, no hope. All of that had him depressed almost as soon as he pulled out of her for the second time, and she got up to make them omelettes in her pink silk nightgown with the slit up one side and flicked on the radio to some chirpy pop song that might as well have been a dirge for all the good it did him.
Her expectation was that he’d want to see Sam first thing, but he put her off. As soon as they stepped out the door (into the bitter prairie-raking wind that made his every cell scream for California), she said, ‘Sam’s going to be so excited to see you – and I didn’t say a word to him so it’s a total surprise,’ and he said, ‘First things first. If Donald’s not on board, then we’ve got nothing – and you know how he can be. Jesus. I just want to get this over with, OK?’ and she said, ‘I can’t believe you – this is Sam we’re talking about. Sam? Remember Sam?’ And maybe he snapped at her, maybe he was overwrought, but by the time they got to campus he was flooded with nostalgia and optimism, and his mood took off on the wings of the caffeine he had to keep ingesting just to get his head above water. Things were going to work out, he kept telling himself, he was sure of it. Or as sure as he could be with her at his side and Sam waiting in the wings and Donald looking to pay down the cost of housing his forty chimps, which should make Carson a no-brainer.
It was quarter past twelve by the time Moncrief came tramping down the hall, shedding students, his Thermos and lunch box in hand (his wife, Dorothy, made him lunch every day, and not just out of frugality, though there was that, but for health reasons too – ‘Donald doesn’t eat processed food,’ she would say whenever anybody asked about it, ‘and he never will, not while I’m alive and breathing’). He moved with the deliberation of a big man, as if afraid of crushing things underfoot, and it took him a moment to scan the office and recognise that the two people rising to greet him were his old protégé and his newest tech. ‘Guy, Jesus, what are you doing here? Slumming, right? Or is it’ – he shifted his eyes to Aimee – ‘something more urgent?’
‘Any excuse,’ he heard himself say, ‘you know me. But if you want to know the truth, I came to see you. I’ve got news. Big news.’
Moncrief’s office hadn’t changed – or not that he could see, anyway. There were the same pictures on the walls – Freud, Lorenz, Goodall, Yerkes, Harlow – and the same Steelcase desk buried in a detritus of papers, books, magazines, stained napkins and various balled-up scraps of the waxed paper Dorothy wrapped his cheese-and-onion sandwiches in. Daily. And the finger, the mysterious non-human finger drifting eternally in a gallon jar of formalin, which had given rise to the rumour that Moncrief had removed it (with a pair of wire cutters) from the chimp that had gouged out his eye, a rumour Moncrief made no effort to discredit, though Guy knew better. They followed Moncrief into his office, where he waved perfunctorily to the two folding chairs at the foot of the desk, then dropped heavily into his own chair, extracted his sandwich and a packet of carrot and celery sticks from the lunch box and began eating without another word. After a moment, chewing, he said, ‘Big news? What big news? Don’t tell me it’s Carson again – or what, Sam started speaking fluent Norwegian?’
‘It’s Carson. And this time it’s for real. I talked to Renee Flowers – she called me – and they want us as soon as we can possibly arrange it.’ He wanted to go on, wanted to make his case, but he was afraid of pushing too hard. Moncrief – Dr Moncrief, Donald, head of the institute, head of the department, head of everything – was as resistant to pressure as anybody alive.
‘Right,’ Moncrief said, waving the sandwich. ‘And what’s this going to do for us again?’
‘Put us back on track. And it’s not just a one-time thing – Renee says it could be, I don’t know, semi-regular.’
‘So we’d be renting him out?’
‘Not exactly. There’s a nominal payment, same as all the guests get, even Joey Bishop or Joan Rivers or whoever, but that’s not it – it’s the exposure.’
‘I’m not following you – how exactly does that pay my bills?’
‘Demand. We’ll increase demand and get the grant money flowing again – and I’ve got an idea for that too I wanted to talk to you about…’
Moncrief set down the sandwich in its cradle of waxed paper, ran two fingers over his eyepatch, as if to assess what wasn’t there. He let out a low grunt. Squared his shoulders. Fixed Guy with his burning one-eyed stare. ‘And how’s he going to get there? You don’t expect me to fly him out to California, do you? You have any idea what that costs? And the time – Jesus, you think I have the time to go running around the country with an animal in tow?’
‘They’ll pay. She already told me – Renee did.’
‘And what about you, Aimee?’ They both turned to her; she was sitting there rigid in the straight-backed chair, a gold cross glinting at her collarbone, her face expressionless. ‘Tell me, truthfully – don’t look at him, look at me – you really want to see your chimp put in a crate underneath some jetliner? And for what, the slim promise of a pay-off down the line when everybody forgets about Borstein and rallies around the adorable little finger-spelling
ape on The Tonight Show? You think that’s going to happen? You think that’ll be good for him?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, glancing up at him and then away again. ‘He’s starting to settle in here, I guess, because there’s no other choice really. But there’s no stimulation for him and he’s stuck’ – her voice caught – ‘in a cage.’
‘Donald,’ Guy said, and he couldn’t help himself, he had to cut in, ‘it’s a chance. No guarantees, but he’d be gone a couple days, a week maybe, right? And what difference would it make – he’s not old enough to breed yet. And he’s just sitting there in a cage – why not make use of him? I mean, we put all that effort into him, couldn’t we at least start to get something back? And if he’s famous – more famous – doesn’t that make the price go up for his offspring?’
Moncrief was regarding him steadily, a thin twitch of amusement working at the corners of his mouth. ‘What do you mean, like racehorses? Like Kentucky Derby winners?’
‘All I’m asking is give it a chance. What have you got to lose?’
‘Ten thousand dollars.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen to him.’
‘Isn’t it flu season? And what about TB – haven’t they got a bunch of farm labourers out there from Mexico, wetbacks that have never even heard of vaccination? What if he gets infected? Worse – what if he brings it back and infects the whole colony? They have zero immunity, zero. It’d be like smallpox and the Indians. And then I wind up with forty dead animals on my hands. You think I want that?’
‘We’re not taking him to a farm. It’s a TV studio. NBC. Burbank. Nothing’s going to happen to him, I guarantee it.’
‘You do, huh? What are you going to do, make him wear a surgical mask? No, listen, the more I hear about this, the crazier it sounds – but one thing’s for certain.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I can guarantee he’s not going to contract TB or the flu or anything else – you know how?’
He did. And he cut him off because he didn’t want to hear it. ‘Please,’ he said, and he was pleading now, pleading for himself, for Sam, for the whole field and the great lumpen TV audience out there sunk amidst their six-packs and corn chips, ‘you know this isn’t right. You give up, now you’re just rolling over to Borstein and the rest of them, your enemies – you want your enemies to win?’
Moncrief narrowed his voice. ‘By keeping him here, that’s how. Right here, under lock and key. And if I keep him long enough to breed him, that’s my business. And if I can get a fair price for him or his offspring or any of the rest of them, that’s what’s called a return on investment, because right now? Right now the money’s flying out of here so fast it’s like the little fuckers are chewing it up and shitting it out.’
The rest of the weekend was just more of the same, farce wedded to tragedy. He spoke with Moncrief twice more, both times by phone, which he could just as well have done from California, but when he got tired of wheedling and pushed back and said they really needed to iron this out face to face, Moncrief said he was busy and as far as he was concerned, the phone was a perfectly adequate conduit of expression. He actually said that, actually used that phrase: conduit of expression. Jesus. It was a power play, of course it was, the alpha male setting the boundaries, which was just what he’d expect from Moncrief, but that he wouldn’t even go out of his way for Carson – Carson and his 15,000,000 viewers – was beyond belief. Moncrief shut him out. He wouldn’t listen. And he ended the second conversation with a rhetorical question, delivered in a low, rumbling whiskey-inflected growl: ‘What is it you don’t understand about no?’
Aimee was distraught. She’d sat there through the whole thing, watched him demean himself, watched Moncrief piss all over him, and even when they were with Sam, she barely broke a smile. On his last night in town, Sunday, he took her to dinner at a place he remembered as being at least tolerable – Pane e Vino, Midwest Italian, Chianti bottles with flickering candles stuck in them, red tablecloths, classical music, waiters who had some sort of unidentifiable accent that might or might not have been Neapolitan. They shared a bottle of Valpolicella while Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’, coursed ironically through the crackling speakers hanging from macramé nets at either end of the room and the wind seethed at the windows. She didn’t say a word, not even to the waiter, and so he’d ordered for her, the vegetarian lasagne, which she hardly touched. She didn’t know about Moncrief’s threat to sell off the chimps if things didn’t improve and he didn’t want to tell her. Or not yet, anyway. He said, ‘Looks like Carson’s out. I mean, face it – it’s hopeless.’
‘I want to cry,’ she said.
‘Maybe you could convince him.’
‘Me? How?’
‘I don’t know – be nice to him.’
There was a moment of silence during which a violin – or maybe a viola – seemed to meld with the sound of the wind hissing at the windows. Her eyes went hard. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying – and you know what, I don’t want to know, OK? And for your information, I am nice to him – how do you think I got the job? And to Sam too – and to the rest of those poor chimps locked up in there like, like… dogs.’
‘He’s going to sell them off.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean biomed.’
She jolted upright in her seat and shot him a look of contempt. ‘You’re a liar.’
What could he say? She was an innocent, she would always be an innocent – until the worst happened. He shrugged. ‘Donald’s getting older. He hasn’t published in years. As long as language studies were getting us attention, he was on board, but that’s over now and all that matters is dollars and cents.’ He picked up his napkin, dropped it on his plate. ‘Unless—’
‘Unless what?’
‘Unless Carson—’
‘Screw Carson. You know what?’ She was angry now, furious, her face distorted, the veins standing out in her neck. ‘Why don’t we just take him?’
The waiter was giving him a significant look from across the room and he raised his hands and made the scribbling motion that indicated he should bring the check, sign language at its most rudimentary. Why didn’t they just take him? Because that was grand theft, a felony, and because Moncrief would come after them like Javert in Les Misérables, and beyond that, where would they keep him? How would they pay for him? And – it came to him in that punishing instant with all the finality of a door slamming shut – he didn’t really want him. Not any more. The realisation shamed him, and because it shamed him, it angered him too. He said, ‘That’s fucking crazy.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I mean it – why don’t we just put him in the back seat of the car and drive away? Right now. Tonight.’ She leaned into the table, her face swelling in the glow of the candle till it seemed to absorb all the light of the room. There was the smell of the red sauce, of wine, of her. The violin – or viola – sawed away at the measure of spring, the waiter floated towards them, the wind hissed. ‘They wouldn’t even know,’ she whispered. ‘Or not till tomorrow, anyway, and by then we’d be—’
‘Fucked?’
‘No, be serious – can’t you be serious? We’d be gone,’ she said. ‘Out of here.’ She reached out and took hold of his hand. ‘Just the three of us.’
SHELL GAME
The game he liked best, the game they used to play in the big room of the house with the tree and the sun that was real and actual and felt good on your back, your shoulders, your face, was the shell game. He loved the shell game. One raisin, three walnut shells, and she would put the raisin under one of the shells and shuffle them around, trying to fool him, which she never did, or almost never. He found the raisin. He ate the raisin. And then it was his turn and though he wanted to eat the next raisin too, he restrained himself and hid it under one of the shells, shuffling them rapidly and feinting with his other hand to throw her off and if she found the raisin, she ate it and if she didn’t, he ate it and it was gone, and so on till the raisi
n BOX was empty. Did she let him win? Was she faking it? What was spatial memory? What was sleight of hand? What was deception? He didn’t know, but he won the game more than he lost it and when he did lose it – when she got the raisin, or Guy, when Guy played and Guy got the raisin – he felt a sudden burning flare of anger and disappointment that shot to the tense corded muscles of his arms and the tightening wires of his hands and fingers that was so hard to control he had to groom himself right then and there, groom her, groom Guy, just to calm down.
There were raisins in the BOX, raisins you could count, separate into groups, eat individually or by the handful, but always, inevitably, at some point they were gone. Until she brought a new box. In here, in this place with the BLACK BUGS and cold concrete, there were no games and no raisins either, except when she slipped a box in under her SHIRT for a special TREAT. That was good, supremely good, but Guy was gone now too, vanished like the raisins in an empty box, and wherever he’d gone – HOME? – he hadn’t taken him along. Which was devastating. Wrong. Catastrophically wrong. It made him angry, made him scream, made him lash out at the BLACK BUGS and even, once, bare his teeth at the BIG MAN, who made him pay, made him cower and writhe and know exactly and intimately who was the slave and who the master.
WHERE GUY? he asked her the first day that Guy didn’t come visit with her.
HE WENT BACK.
WHERE?
He could read her face. She was thinking about that, thinking she might have to conceal the truth from him, lie to him, but after a minute she signed, HOME.
MY TREE, he signed, and then again, making it a question, MY TREE?